Ryan Field
Jul 11
in Engineering, Product Development | No comments

10 Optics Lab best practices to produce great data

Optics Lab Best practices
Over many years of working in optics labs, I’ve come across a variety of lab practices ranging from admirable to appalling.  These practices can have a significant impact both on the quality of data and the efficiency with which it’s collected. Below, some optics lab best practices to help create an optics lab environment that is clean, organized, efficient, and produces great data.

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Astero StarFish
Jun 20
in Business, Engineering, Industrial Design, Product Development, Project Management, StarFish Culture | No comments

Insights and observations that spark medtech innovation

Improve your medical device innovation process

Medtech Innovation

Everyone has a mental toolkit of innovation – a series of patterns that innovative people find. They take something and they break it into pieces or they take pieces and put them together or they put things upside down or they hollow them out or they turn them inside out or they…what else do we do? We think about it backwards or what if some piece was missing. How much difference would that make with the outside in and inside out? What if we actually thought of it from the other perspective altogether?

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Dana Trousil
Jun 12
in Engineering, Industrial Design, Product Development | No comments

Tips to help prototype a medical device on a budget

prototype medical devices

Figure 1: Cardboard models are inexpensive and yet very elaborate

There are so many methods available to prototype that I’d like to expand upon an earlier blog. In this article I share the low-cost tips and methods on how to prototype a medical device on a budget that I use in my New Product Introduction (NPI) work. Just as importantly, I explain when I use these methods. Not everything needs to be a painted, fully functional prototype.

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Chrystal Palaty
Jun 3
in Biotech, Community, entrepreneur, Events, Product Development | No comments

6 Commercialization insights from serial medtech entrepreneurs

Medical device commercialization insightsParticipant’s takeaways from 2019 Medical Device Playbook

Medical Device Playbook was conceived as a way to inspire entrepreneurship and connect the many players in the Medical Device world. In seven words, I would describe this as an “informative and inspirational storytelling event, great people”.
Medtech innovators and investors described their first-hand commercialization, partnership, regulatory, and financing experiences. My key medical device commercialization insights:

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Peter Kazakoff
May 3
in Business, Engineering, Product Development | No comments

Time to add cellular data connectivity to your medical devices?

cellular data connectivity The value proposition is easy to see and the advantages can be well worth the investment.
Connected medical devices are shaking up the industry. Look at just about any home healthcare device in the last few years: chances are, you’ll find some sort of wireless chipset inside to radio information to the internet for telemedicine purposes.

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Brent Godau
May 3
in Business, Community, Engineering | No comments

Can industry taught academic programs help bridge the medtech skills gap?

medtech skills gapDespite a high number of university or college graduates looking for entry level work in the tech industry, companies still report difficulty in hiring [1]. This is in part due to a medtech skills gap between entry level work and university training. Industry involvement in academia has the power to address this issue. Who better to teach skills within academia than those who have them?

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Astero StarFish
May 3
in Business, Engineering, entrepreneur, Industrial Design, Manufacturing | No comments

13 Lessons learned from 20 years of medical device commercialization

medical commercialization lessons learnedAs part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we asked our experts to share the biggest lesson they have learned in medical device commercialization.  Several themes emerged: budgets, production readiness, usability, and what to tackle first.  Here are their top 13 lessons learned in no particular order.

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Andrew Zavorotny
May 1
in Engineering, Product Development | No comments

Improve fastening 3D printed components with threaded inserts

fastening 3D printed componentsRapid Prototyping – Augmented

Fastening 3D printed components presents a frustrating challenge. While we can print threads directly as a feature of parts, the resolution of the thread and the strength of the threads make printing seldom viable. We can bond parts, but that loses replaceability or maintenance. Self-tapping screws can work effectively as well, but often the materials used in 3D printing can crack under installation stresses. Fortunately, there is another option: installing metal inserts. In this blog I discuss a variety of commonly used threaded inserts.

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Paul Hulme
Apr 2
in Product Development, Project Management | No comments

Reduce medical device program risks with smart testing strategies

Reduce medical device program risksTesting underpins the entire medical device development process. It provides the tangible evidence of device efficacy and safety.  Testing generally begins with a reasonably ad hoc approach in Phase Zero for proof of concept and then shifts to a more formalized testing strategy to address safety and efficacy. At this point in time, product definition has matured to include the identification of specifications for the device to be tested. The following is a brief overview of a systematic approach to device testing, from laying the groundwork to writing the final report.

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David Felix
Apr 2
in Product Development, Project Management, Uncategorized | No comments

3 ways to leverage talent in medtech development  

Leveraging TalentI would like to take us all back to high school Biology for a moment to remember the concept of emergent properties. These properties only come out when individual parts start interacting with each other in any given system. Take common salt for example. The fact that it tastes salty does not mean that the sodium and chlorine which make up salt also taste salty. Saltiness is an emergent property. Often, so are the problems we encounter when developing medical devices. 

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